Friday, March 29, 2019
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Saturday, April 18, 2026
Blazon Revisited
Sunday, July 6, 2025
The Importance of Answering Earnestly
Max Eastman, 1931 — The Literary Mind —
Compare and contrast —
“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light,
an image of unutterable conviction,
the reason why the artist works and lives
and has his being — the reward he seeks —
the only reward he really cares about,
without which there is nothing. It is to snare
the spirits of mankind in nets of magic,
to make his life prevail through his creation,
to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful
substance of his own experience, into the congruence
of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves
the core of life, the essential pattern whence
all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”
— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River
Monday, April 27, 2020
The Cracked Nut
“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable
conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being –
the reward he seeks –the only reward he really cares about, without which
there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic,
to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life,
the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence
of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the
essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”
— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River
“… the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure on its
complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it.
(It induces A8 on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation
group of the affine space.)”
— Peter J. Cameron,
The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups (pdf)
“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning
of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not
typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside…."
— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
Friday, March 29, 2019
The Blazon World*
“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light,
an image of unutterable conviction,
the reason why the artist works and lives
and has his being — the reward he seeks —
the only reward he really cares about,
without which there is nothing. It is to snare
the spirits of mankind in nets of magic,
to make his life prevail through his creation,
to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful
substance of his own experience, into the congruence
of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves
the core of life, the essential pattern whence
all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”
— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River
* Title suggested by that of a Siri Hustvedt novel.
See also Blazon in this journal.
Friday, June 29, 2012
The Uploading (continued)*
It Must Be Abstract
It Must Change
It Must Give Pleasure
— Parts of a poem by Wallace Stevens
“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”
– Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River
Of Time and the River and the Frogs —
* This post's title refers to the above uploading date— Jan. 26, 2008.
Monday, July 5, 2010
Window
“Examples are the stained-glass
windows of knowledge.” — Nabokov
Related material:
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Tuesday April 29, 2008
at Harvard:
Thomas Wolfe
(Harvard M.A., 1922)
versus
Rosalind Krauss
(Harvard M.A., 1964,
Ph.D., 1969)
on
"No culture has a pact with eternity."
— George Steiner, interview in
The Guardian of
"At that instant he saw,
in one blaze of light, an image
of unutterable conviction….
the core of life, the essential
pattern whence all other things
proceed, the kernel of eternity."
— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time
and the River, quoted in
Log24 on June 9, 2005
From today's online Harvard Crimson:
"… under the leadership of Faust,
Harvard students should look forward
to an ever-growing opportunity for
international experience
and artistic endeavor."
Pauli as Mephistopheles
in a 1932 parody of
Goethe's Faust at Niels Bohr's
institute in Copenhagen
From a recent book
on Wolfgang Pauli,
The Innermost Kernel:
A belated happy birthday
to the late
Felix Christian Klein
(born on April 25) —
Another Harvard figure quoted here on Dec. 5, 2002:
"The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety, a subtlety in which it was natural for Cézanne to say: 'I see planes bestriding each other and sometimes straight lines seem to me to fall' or 'Planes in color…. The colored area where shimmer the souls of the planes, in the blaze of the kindled prism, the meeting of planes in the sunlight.' The conversion of our Lumpenwelt went far beyond this. It was from the point of view of another subtlety that Klee could write: 'But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space– which he calls the mind or heart of creation– determines every function.' Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less."
— Wallace Stevens, Harvard College Class of 1901, "The Relations between Poetry and Painting" in The Necessary Angel (Knopf, 1951)
From a review of Rosalind Krauss's The Optical Unconscious (MIT Press hardcover, 1993):
Krauss is concerned to present Modernism less in terms of its history than its structure, which she seeks to represent by means of a kind of diagram: "It is more interesting to think of modernism as a graph or table than a history." The "table" is a square with diagonally connected corners, of the kind most likely to be familiar to readers as the Square of Opposition, found in elementary logic texts since the mid-19th century. The square, as Krauss sees it, defines a kind of idealized space "within which to work out unbearable contradictions produced within the real field of history." This she calls, using the inevitable gallicism, "the site of Jameson's Political Unconscious" and then, in art, the optical unconscious, which consists of what Utopian Modernism had to kick downstairs, to repress, to "evacuate… from its field."
— Arthur C. Danto in ArtForum, Summer 1993
Rosalind Krauss in The Optical Unconscious (MIT Press paperback, 1994):
For a presentation of the Klein Group, see Marc Barbut, "On the Meaning of the Word 'Structure' in Mathematics," in Introduction to Structuralism, ed. Michael Lane (New York: Basic Books, 1970). Claude Lévi-Strauss uses the Klein group in his analysis of the relation between Kwakiutl and Salish masks in The Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), p. 125; and in relation to the Oedipus myth in "The Structural Analysis of Myth," Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jackobson [sic] and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963). In a transformation of the Klein Group, A. J. Greimas has developed the semiotic square, which he describes as giving "a slightly different formulation to the same structure," in "The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints," On Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 50. Jameson uses the semiotic square in The Political Unconscious (see pp. 167, 254, 256, 277) [Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981)], as does Louis Marin in "Disneyland: A Degenerate Utopia," Glyph, no. 1 (1977), p. 64.
Wikipedia on the Klein group (denoted V, for Vierergruppe):
In this representation, V is a normal subgroup of the alternating group A4 (and also the symmetric group S4) on 4 letters. In fact, it is the kernel of a surjective map from S4 to S3. According to Galois theory, the existence of the Klein four-group (and in particular, this representation of it) explains the existence of the formula for calculating the roots of quartic equations in terms of radicals.
For material related to Klee's phrase mentioned above by Stevens, "the organic center of all movement in time and space," see the following Google search:
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Thursday June 21, 2007
Let No Man
Write My Epigraph
"His graceful accounts of the Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello illuminated the works’ structural logic as well as their inner spirituality."
—Allan Kozinn on Mstislav Rostropovich in The New York Times, quoted in Log24 on April 29, 2007
"At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction…. the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity."
— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River, quoted in Log24 on June 9, 2005
"… the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure on its complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it. (It induces A8 on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation group of the affine space.)"
— Peter J. Cameron, "The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups" (pdf)
"… donc Dieu existe, réponse!"
what the mandala really is:
'Formation, Transformation,
Eternal Mind's eternal recreation'"
(Faust, Part Two, as
quoted by Jung in
Memories, Dreams, Reflections)
"Pauli as Mephistopheles
in a 1932 parody of
Goethe's Faust at Niels Bohr's
institute in Copenhagen.
The drawing is one of
many by George Gamow
illustrating the script."
— Physics Today
'To meet someone' was his enigmatic answer. 'To search for the stone that the Great Architect rejected, the philosopher's stone, the basis of the philosophical work. The stone of power. The devil likes metamorphoses, Corso.'"
— The Club Dumas, basis for the Roman Polanski film "The Ninth Gate" (See 12/24/05.)
"Pauli linked this symbolism
with the concept of automorphism."
— The Innermost Kernel
(previous entry)
And from
"Symmetry in Mathematics
and Mathematics of Symmetry"
(pdf), by Peter J. Cameron,
a paper presented at the
International Symmetry Conference,
Edinburgh, Jan. 14-17, 2007,
we have
The Epigraph–
(Here "whatever" should
of course be "whenever.")
Also from the
Cameron paper:
|
Local or global?
Among other (mostly more vague) definitions of symmetry, the dictionary will typically list two, something like this:
• exact correspondence of parts; Mathematicians typically consider the second, global, notion, but what about the first, local, notion, and what is the relationship between them? A structure M is homogeneous if every isomorphism between finite substructures of M can be extended to an automorphism of M; in other words, "any local symmetry is global." |
Some Log24 entries
related to the above politically
(women in mathematics)–
Global and Local:
One Small Step
and mathematically–
Structural Logic continued:
Structure and Logic (4/30/07):
This entry cites
Alice Devillers of Brussels–
"The aim of this thesis
is to classify certain structures
which are, from a certain
point of view, as homogeneous
as possible, that is which have
as many symmetries as possible."
"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."
Thursday, June 9, 2005
Thursday June 9, 2005
continued
"At that instant he saw,
in one blaze of light,
an image of unutterable conviction….
the core of life, the essential pattern
whence all other things proceed,
the kernel of eternity."
— Thomas Wolfe,
Of Time and the River
From "The Relations between
Poetry and Painting," by Wallace Stevens:
"The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety…. It was from the point of view of… [such a] subtlety that Klee could write: 'But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space—which he calls the mind or heart of creation— determines every function.' Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less."
Diagrams of this group may have influenced Giovanni Sambin, professor of mathematical logic at the University of Padua; the following impressive-looking diagram is from Sambin's
Sambin argues that this diagram reflects some of the basic structures of thought itself… making it perhaps one way to describe what Klee called the "mind or heart of creation."
But this verges on what Stevens called the sacerdotal. It seems that a simple picture of the "kernel of eternity" as the four-group, a picture without reference to logic or philosophy, and without distracting letters and labels, is required. The following is my attempt to supply such a picture:
This is a picture of the four-group
as a permutation group on four points.
Pairs of colored arrows indicate the three
transformations other than the identity,
which may be regarded either as
invisible or as rendered by
the four black points themselves.
Update of 7:45 PM Thursday:
Review of the above (see comments)
by a typical Xanga reader:
"Ur a FUCKIN' LOSER!!!!! LMFAO!!!!"
For more merriment, see
The Optical Unconscious
and
The Painted Word.
A recent Xangan movie review:
So a big ol' fuck you to George Lucas. Fuck you, George!"
Both Xangans seem to be fluent in what Tom Wolfe has called the "fuck patois."
A related suggestion from Google:
These remarks from Xangans and Google
suggest the following photo gift,
based on a 2003 journal entry:
Wednesday, June 8, 2005
Wednesday June 8, 2005
Kernel of Eternity
Today is the feast day of Saint Gerard Manley Hopkins, “immortal diamond.”
“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”
— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River
“… the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure on its complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it. (It induces A8 on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation group of the affine space.)”
— Peter J. Cameron,
The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups (pdf)
“… donc Dieu existe, réponse!”
— attributed, some say falsely, to Leonhard Euler
Sunday, June 8, 2003
Sunday June 8, 2003
Of Time and the River
Today is the feast day of Saint Gerard Manley Hopkins, “immortal diamond.”
“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”
“entered the university at Chapel Hill at fifteen ‘an awkward, unhappy misfit.’ By the time he graduated, he was editor of the college newspaper….”
Jeff MacNelly, who died on this date in the Year of Our Lord 2000,
“in 1977 started drawing the comic strip ‘Shoe‘…. The strip was named in honor of the legendary Jim Shumaker, for whom MacNelly worked at the Chapel Hill Weekly.”
From my Monday, June 2, 2003 entry:
Two quotations from “The Diamond Project“:
“We all know that something is eternal,” the Stage Manager says. “And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even stars—everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.”
— John Lahr, review of “Our Town““Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.”
— Song of Solomon
Here are some other thoughts from the same date, but a different time, fictional time, Faulkner time:
Where the shadow of the bridge fell I could see down for a long way, but not as far as the bottom. When you leave a leaf in water a long time after a while the tissue will be gone and the delicate fibers waving slow as the motion of sleep. They dont touch one another, no matter how knotted up they once were, no matter how close they lay once to the bones. And maybe when He says Rise the eyes will come floating up too, out of the deep quiet and the sleep, to look on glory.
— William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
The concluding link from my June 2, 2003, entry furnishes a clue to the timelessness of Quentin Compson‘s thoughts above:
Glory… Song of Songs 8. 7-8
From the King James Bible‘s rendition of the Song of Songs:
8:7 Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.
8:8 We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for?
For Quentin Compson’s thoughts on his little sister Caddy, consult the online hypertext edition of
